Oil & Water: israel and democracy don't mix
Jonathan Cook makes an excellent case against israel's bogus claim of being a "democracy."
The second Palestinian intifada has been crushed. The 700km wall is sealing the occupied population of the West Bank into a series of prisons.The "demographic timebomb" -- the fear that Palestinians, through higher birth rates, will soon outnumber Jews in the Holy Land and that Israel's continuing rule over them risks being compared to apartheid -- has been safely defused through the disengagment from Gaza and its 1.4 million inhabitants.
On the fortieth anniversary of Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, Israel's security establishment is quitely satisfied with its successes.
But like a shark whose physiology requires that, to stay alive, it never sleeps or stops moving, Israel must remain restless, constantly reinventing itself and its policies to ensure its ethnic project does not lose legitimacy, even as it devours the Palestinian homeland. By keeping a step ahead of the analysts and worldwide opinion, Israel creates facts on the ground that cement its supremacist and expansionist agenda.
So, with these achievements under its belt, where next for the Jewish state?
I have been arguing for some time that Israel's ultimate goal is to create an ethnic fortress, a Jewish space in expanded borders from which all Palestinians -- including its 1.2 million Palestinian citizens -- will be excluded. That was the purpose of the Gaza disengagement and it is also the point of the wall snaking through the West Bank, effectively annexing to Israel what little is left of a potential Palestinian state.
It should therefore be no surprise that we are witnessing the first moves in Israel's next phase of conquest of the Palestinians. With the 3.7 million Palestinians in the occupied territories caged inside their ghettos, unable to protest their treatment behind fences and walls, the turn has come of Israel's Palestinian citizens.
These citizens, today nearly a fifth of Israel's population, are the legacy of an oversight by the country's Jewish leaders during the ethnic cleansing campaign of the 1948 war. Ever since Israel has been pondering what to do with them.
There was a brief debate in the state's first years about whether they should be converted to Judaism and assimilated, or whether they should be marginalised and eventually expelled. The latter view, favoured by the country's first prime minister, David Ben Gurion, dominated. The question has been when and how to do the deed.
The time now finally appears to be upon us, and the crushing of these more than one million unwanted citizens currently inside the walls of the fortress -- the Achilles' heel of the Jewish state -- is likely to be just as ruthless as that of the Palestinians under occupation.
In my recent book Blood and Religion, I charted the preparations for this crackdown. Israel has been secretly devising a land swap scheme that would force up to a quarter of a million Palestinian citizens (but hardly any territory) into the Palestinian ghetoes being crafted next door -- in return Israel will annex swaths of the West Bank on which the illegal Jewish settlements sit.
The Bedouin in the Negev are being reclassified as trespassers on state land so that they can be treated as guest workers rather than citizens. And lawyers in the Justice Ministry are toiling over a loyalty scheme to deal with the remaining Palestinians: pledge an oath to Israel as a Jewish and democratic state (that is, one in which you are not wanted) or face being stripped of your rights and possibly expelled.
There will be no resistance to these moves from Israel's Jewish public. Opinion polls consistently show that two-thirds of Israeli Jews support "transfer" of the country's Palestinian population. With a veneer of legality added to the ethnic cleansing, the Jewish consensus will be almost complete.
But these measures cannot be implemented until an important first battle has been waged and won in the Knesset, the Israeli parliament. One of Israel's gurus of the so-called "demographic threat", Arnon Sofer, a professor at Haifa University, has explained the problem posed by the presence of a growing number of Palestinian voters: "In their hands lies the power to determine the right of return [of Palestinian refugees] or to decide who is a Jew In another few years, they will be able to decide whether the state of Israel should continue to be a Jewish-Zionist state."
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Simply put, israel and democracy don't mix.
In order for israel to continue to exist as a so-called democracy, it must continue to marginalize and expel every non-Jew on the land, otherwise it will cease to exist.
If I am not mistaken, Cyrus established the first modern concept of state in 6th century BC in and around Iran. He abolished for the first time the old tribal "qualifications" as a condition to citizenship or community membership. "Qualifications" meant and means ethnic linearity, language, religion, place of birth etc. that individuals have no control over. He replaced it with "commitments" by entering in a "covenant". There were three "commitments" at the time that allowed someone to become an Iranian citizen, namely, 1-Pledge of allegiance to the central government. 2-Participate in wars at the time of war. 3-Pay taxes (twice a year). In return the government provided security and citizenship rights.
These are today's top three commitments (there are more added to it) to become a naturalized US citizen. In other words US is today's most modern concept of state in terms of respecting individual's "will" to become a citizen as opposed to "qualifications" out of control of the individual.
Now who is on the other end of the spectrum tody, or the most fossilized tribal concept of state? Who runs a DNA test on your blood to ascertain your "qualification" to become a citizen and at which caste? (Non semitic Judaized mongoloid Turk to be on the top). Who checks your ancestral tree history to make sure of your religion? ....Israel (I always wonder why this word is so close to Azrael = angel of death?)
Now why on earth these two countries should be friends?!
A country can not be PRO-ONE ETHNIC GROUP and ANTI-ANOTHER ETHNIC GROUP and be a democracy!
WHEN WILL PEOPLE WAKE UP? TO THE LIES?
"I may not agree with what you say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it"...Voltaire